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Kansas City Was First To Embrace Google Fiber, Now Its Broadband Future Is 'TBD' (vice.com)
Five years after the opportunity arose in 2011 for Kansas City to become the first community to pilot Google Fiber, expansion of the gigabit per second service has come to a screeching halt. Kaleigh Rogers from Motherboard writes about how Kansas City's broadband future is "to be determined." From the report: Thousands of customers in KC who had pre-registered for guaranteed service when Fiber made it to their neighborhood were given their money back earlier this year, and told they may never get hooked up. Fiber cycled through two CEOs in the last 10 months, lost multiple executives, and has started laying off employees. Plans to expand Fiber to eight other American cities halted late last year, leaving the fate of the project up in the air. I recently asked Rachel Hack Merlo, the Community Manager for Google Fiber in Kansas City, about the future of the expanding the project service there, and she told me it was "TBD." Kansas City expected to become Google's glittering example of a futuristic gig-city: Half a decade later, there are examples of how Fiber benefitted KC, and stories about how it fell short. Thousands of customers will likely never get the chance to access the infrastructure they rallied behind, and many communities are still without any broadband access at all. Many are now left wondering: is that it?
I'm routinely reminded of the fact that the only reason Google hasn't ascended to Umbrella Corp-level mass evil manipulation of the world is that it is, in many cases, completely incompetent. Great engineers inventing great algorithms, but its successes are in spite of its own internal dysfunction.
If it ever figures out how to operate intelligently, though... Look out. We'll all be doomed.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Well, yeah - I thought it was pretty well known that all Google was doing was lighting up dark fiber which was already in place.
Have they actually rolled out new fiber anywhere?
#DeleteChrome
I doubt Trump has anything to do with it. Google Fibre foundered for years under the Obama administration and I doubt the Feds really care all that much regaerdless of who is charge. I'd look a the Governor or Mayor to see if that's where the holdup is at.
They hooked up every house in my subdivision... except mine. After much calling back and forth, it became clear how mismanaged this Google Fiber project was. Their left hand did not know what their right hand was doing. It was laughable to keep getting so much contradicting information about the status of my "install". Finally they called and canceled on us. Oh well, Google started falling out of favor with me years ago. I am probably lucky that I am not all the more tangled up with them.
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If it is Google Fiber specifically or from another company, the project was a total succeeds. In my neighborhood, access speeds went from being around 20-30mbps on the top end to Gigabit through CenturyLink. Countless other ISPs have all started offering gigabit class service due to the pressure that Google Fiber caused. Google brought competition, and the market was forced to react. (almost) everyone wins! Except those smucks still stuck in areas that have government restrictions on what can/cant be made available in their areas.
Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry. The pattern however is that within a year or few when the fanfare dies down they lose interest and chase the next shiny object. Even if they come out with a new service I lust for, I would just be cynical and skeptical due to a long history of failing to follow through.
I concur with this. Google may have smart folks, but their implementations SUCKS. IMO android is a tire fire compared to iOS, we live here in KC and have google fiber + tv. And the TV part is an absolute abortion. Rather than embed the software IN the end users device they insist it be run from the cloud. Guess what? That is a horrible idea. The UI is slow, jerky, you can't FF or RW through commercials on recorded! shows and movies, but if you pause TV for 30 minutes you can use that as a buffer to FF through commercials. Consistency FTW! The UI because it is cloud based becomes unresponsive resorting to having to reboot the TV and Network box to get it to work. It's just a horrible UI and app. I am not impressed with google, at all. I see google being replaced at some point because they simply can't make a product that isn't a mess. They create tons of services and apps and kill almost all of them once people start using them. Im just not a fan of google. I don't know what they are going to with the Fiber rollouts. They got special rights and leeway from the city of KC to roll this out and now they cant get it done. For whatever reason. Someone needs to start doing some high speed wireless pop's all over the city. I don't think anything but wireless has a shot in hell because of all the laws and regulations restricting laying fiber that have been built up over the decades.
What's the difference between Google and a toddler?
A toddler doesn't get bored with its toys so quickly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Have they actually rolled out new fiber anywhere?
Who knows. They don't share any plans or thinking. They're as tight lipped as every other telecom.
I recall getting shouted down because I said Google wasn't any better than the incumbents and that they'd cherry-pick the better neighborhoods and leave the rest in the dark. Some Google fanboi insisted they'd wire the ghettos and show everyone how it's done.
The truth is that Google's incentives are as fouled up as the traditional providers. They all want the easy-to-reach customers that have lots of disposable income. Comcast et al. want to sell expensive bundles to a captive audience and Google wants lucrative data about people with money. None of these parties have any incentive to stretch their systems beyond dense, high income urban areas.
Small, independent operators motivated to light as many properties as possible as cheaply as possible could solve this problem, but they have no hope getting through the regulatory mine field and the incumbent obstacles. So here we sit in our balkanized country with mountains of rules and regulations, fat government blessed monopolies and costly, limited pathetic Internet service, getting scrutinized with a digital microscope because we have only a handful monster operators, vertically integrated from your POP all they way up to the NSA and everything in between, to choose from.
If we really want fiber to the premises coast to coast in this country, we will need a government initiative to make it happen.
Trump wants to build a wall, and rebuild America's infrastructure - maybe it's time to include fiber in those plans and start treating fiber connectivity like the utility it is. This is too important to be left to companies with an attention span that lasts only through the current fiscal quarter.
it spooked the other players in the market enough that one of them brought Gigbit fiber to my house and charged me the same rate google charges in their service area.
That's exactly what Google was hoping would happen. Everyone I knew from Google (although no one involved in the project, so no inside knowledge) indicated that Google wants high speed Internet everywhere, because as far as they're concerned, more Internet = more Google.
The incumbents were dragging their feet, so Google Fiber was created mostly as a project to spook the incumbents into doing their own Fiber faster.
Unfortunately, I suspect Google found out *why* the incumbents were dragging their feet. Just providing fiber as a utility service is *enormously* expensive, with a massively slow payback.
Anyway, if the incumbents can get their fiber act together, that would remove any reason for Google to continue supporting a Google Fiber project at all. As it is, it seems they've mostly shelved it anyway. Kind of sad, but unless Americans and Canadians are willing to be packed into the same density as Koreans, super-high speed Internet is going to be mostly restricted to a few enclaves for the foreseeable future.
is massively, massively overpriced. Comcast admitted in one of their SEC filings that their $70/mo package cost them just $9/mo net (e.g. that includes support). That means anyone that tries to compete at that $70 price point is already doomed because Comcast et al can just drop their pants until the competition dies out. Which as far as I can tell is exactly what they did here. That's not competition though. It's a temporary price cut until competition dies on the vine.
TL;DR: Municipal broadband for the win. Anyone who complains about socialism gets shouted down. Enough already. It's too valuable for it not to be a public utility. It's right up there with water and electricity.
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First pass a resolution to build out fibre in the rest of the city yourself with an appropriate bond measure.
Create a special utility to manage it. During build out it will be it's own independent company and contractor but will later be turned into a public utility. It will have the power of the city to tear out streets in the middle of the night and to work 24 hours a day in certain circumstances. Use many subcontractors and don't require unions. Use your union guys to inspect the work and maybe work in difficult areas. Build it out one small section at a time per contractor. Let the contractors compete and use the appropriate contractor for each section.
Last invite providers to install trunks into your faciliy at their cost and under your rules. Customers are required to buy their own city approved optical interface equipment per house and to pay a one time $500 hook up fee to have the equipment installed.
The whole thing will be paid off in ten to fifteen years and the city can either keep the money coming in or reduce everyone's bill.
Yes, yes, socialism sucks.
That will be why the US ISP's do so well without any taxpayer money at all.
Oh, wait, they don't.
Or here's a more recent story about the sort of crony capitalism you have to live with in the US.
Gosh but socialism is so awful.
I own an ISP and net neutrality is a *good* thing - for us and for our customers. Net neutrality has *always been* part of the internet's DNA. If you believe otherwise then you've been swallowed the propaganda and you're about to get tossed onto someone's dinner plate.
Telecom infrastructure is MASSIVELY profitable. Just ask Carlos Slim what a "money pit" it has been for him. The reason why Google can't pull it off is because the ROI is measured in decades rather than a few years that every wants to demand these days. Google fiber would have been a huge money maker 30 years from now - after everyone at Google who stands to actually profit from the venture is already dead.
Google's incentives are as fouled up
I don't know that I'd call it fouled up. Google's incentives are pretty clear: Create the most profit possible. They're a company after all and that's kind of a company's whole gig.
That's why leaving essential services to unregulated industries is a bad idea: Even when the companies are acting in good faith, their incentives are not aligned with the incentives of the populace. And now that broadband is close to being labeled and essential service (I believe it even already has that label in some jurisdictions,) we need to create some method to incentivize providing broadband to less wealthy and less populated areas.
Up here in Canada we subsidize the big providers to expand into those areas. It works OK when providing service to the less wealthy areas of cities, but its been a moderate disaster with regards to rural areas (of which we have a lot in Canada.) The companies keep taking the handouts, doing a fraction of what they claimed they were going to do with the money and pocketing the rest, and then turn around with their hands out again the next time the citizens complain about lack of connectivity in remote areas.
So that's one option. One that hasn't worked very well and I'm not sure how it could be improved upon..
Simply penalizing the companies for not following through might make us feel better but would still leave those areas unserviced.
The only other option really is government-provided broadband. If the government's basically paying for it anyway, just cut out the middleman and do it yourself. That has the obvious downside of government inefficiency (and these days, spying) but its still more efficient than Bell or Rogers or whoever just taking the money without actually bothering to provide service.
I find it interesting that many people here are complaining that Google and other telecoms are only focusing on high income "cherry picked" areas to provide Internet. It costs a ton of money to run fiber, what do they expect? If you want it run to everyone it really should be municipal...
However, either way..
Speaking from personal experience, even if you offer broadband internet access for a regular price of $19.95 to poorer apartment complexes you will only get a few subscribers. It is very counter-intuitive, since you would expect to get a large number of subscribers.
I was involved in a local ISP that was doing exactly this over a long period of time marketed to a large number of different apartment complexes with residents across the economic spectrum. At first it was heavily marketed to lower income areas since the initial thought was that they were being ignored by the bigger companies. However, after an extremely low response, the only ones we got more than a few subscribers from were the ones with middle class or higher residents on average (and we got many, many subscribers from those higher income complexes.)
After further research, many of hose poorer households either only had internet through their phones (I'm assuming for cost reasons) or, would just pay a much higher price to the cable company for internet access since they already had cable television. As a side note, many of the poorer households that had internet through the cable company were paying hundreds of dollars for their TV service, but, were struggling in other areas.
Based on my experience, if google or anyone tried to roll out fiber to the home to everyone and focused on poorer neighborhoods they would fail before they started.
You seem to have forgotten what the C in AC stands for. Not to pick on the person but most certainly their are crap corporations out there like Google who will absolutely fire you for expressing an opinion their corporate marketing team do not approve of ie https://theintercept.com/2017/... and http://www.smh.com.au/technolo... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and, well, enough is enough. Whilst I can write ESAD Google and the big shit at Alphabet, no it is not a joke, I mean it, many can not and will suffer consequences for doing so. Google as evil as they come not better or worse than M$ and in the most surprising fashion, consider their exploitative over priced based on marketing nature, much worse than Apple.
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